


The Ideomotor Effect

by Goodknight



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Animal Sacrifice (chicken), Blood, Demon Summoning, Demonic Possession, Dysfunctional Family, Horror, M/M, Ouija, Things You'd Expect From a Horror Movie, Violence, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-07-18 14:42:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7319299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goodknight/pseuds/Goodknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Be silent in that solitude,<br/>     Which is not loneliness—for then<br/>The spirits of the dead who stood<br/>     In life before thee are again<br/>In death around thee — <strong><em>and their will</em></strong><br/><strong><em>Shall overshadow thee: be still.'</em></strong><br/>              - Spirits of the Dead, Edgar Allen Poe</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ideomotor Effect

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to [Zwee](http://www.rufflesmontilyet.tumblr.com) for tolerating my groupchat take-over while I was sorting out the kinks of this story, for reading it through to make sure everything was in its proper place, and for suggesting a title that is way better than anything I'd've come up with. ♥ 
> 
> If there's anything that you think should be tagged in addition to the tags already in place, please let me know. I personally feel that the themes here are mature, but not overly explicit or graphic. Our opinions may differ on what constitutes graphic/explicit content (I have shite judgement and watch too many horror movies) and I'm not confident where this fic fits in the rating system, so please mind the additional tags, as for these reasons, I have chosen not to warn or rate this story. With that said, I really hope you enjoy! :) 
> 
> (I also suggest listening to a horror playlist while reading for bonus horrible fun)!

'It's angelica scented.' Rey lifted a bag full of salt, dried flowers, and two stout, white candles from the book bag at her feet. 'I made it.'

Leia smiled. 'Thank you, Rey. It's beautiful.'

There was a faint thump as the prongs of Ren's fork bit through the back of his hand and hit the table.

The cords in Rey's neck stood up like hackles. She broke eye contact with her cousin to watch blood rise from under his fingers, shiny under the light from the chandelier, and then back to his eyes, and they were shiny too - black beetles, damp dark mould, the holes in old floorboards, pits in the forest, grave dirt.

'Get. Out.' Ren snarled.

'Ben.' Leia chastised.

'No one is lighting any candles.'

'Your little cousin can light candles if she wants to, Ben.'

Ren's blood had found the grain of the wood, and was rolling away from him. His knuckles were white around the fork handle.

'Aunt Leia.' Rey said, as Ren's black eyes and red mouth glinted wetly and meanly at her. 'He stabbed him.'

Leia glanced up at Rey, followed her gaze to the bloody hand pinned to the dining table. 'Ben!' she gasped, after a shocked pause during which some of Ren's blood nearly touched Rey's knife and she had to move it. 'What do you think you - _What_?'

Leia's eyes were imploring, resigned and sad. She stood gracefully from the table, told her son not to dare move, and disappeared down the hallway.

While she was gone, Rey pushed her chair away from her place and backed away from Ren as he quietly pulled the fork back out.

'Leave me alone!' Ren roared when Leia returned with a roll of gauze and her car keys. He flung the fork at her with his uninjured hand, and it bounced off her knee to clatter harmlessly but deafeningly loudly across the floor.

'Ben, don't be ridiculous. Get in the car.'

Rey tried to become invisible against the wall as Ren's face contorted with rage. He paced behind his chair, heavy footfalls and heavy breathing, like he was heavier than reality, so big and so furious Rey thought Leia, who was creeping closer with her bandages and her determined mouth, looked like a little doll, and Ren a careless child who could send her flying across the room with a sweep of his bleeding hand. Then he was storming past her, fists clenched, crying, and disappearing up the stairs.

'He's evil.' Rey told Leia, as the great black presence at her cousin's back drifted malevolently after him.

'No, dear.' Leia told her. 'He's a teenaged boy.'

 

When the video call loaded, Ren was smearing blood and tears across his cheeks with the back of his hand.

'How was dinner with your family?' Hux asked primly.

It always impressed Hux how quickly Ren could stop crying. He was a ruined, streaky mess. And then he wasn't.

'I stabbed myself with a fork.'

'And why did you do that?'

Ren sneered and twitched some of his long hair out of his face. 'I don't know.' He said. 'How are you doing?'

Hux leant back in his desk chair and sighed. Ren was holding his hand to his chest. His forearm was shaking. It looked like he'd actually skewered himself, all the way through the sinew and tissue and muscle. 'Should you have pulled the fork out?' Hux asked.

Ren shrugged. He looked wan, but the light in his attic bedroom always did drain what little colour he had from his hollowed out cheeks. Hux suspected Ren liked looking like a ghostly head bobbing in the inky sea of his thick, black hair.

'It looks like it will scar, Ren.'

Ren's frown was absolute and tight. His shoulders hunched around his folded up arms, protecting the injury.

'At least wrap something around it.' Hux snapped.

'My mum tried to bandage it.'

'And you didn't let her, _why_?'

'I threw the fork at her.' Ren took a deep breath as though he was about to start sobbing again, but instead his soft, mole-speckled face swung forward and down to flop with a clatter on his keyboard.

Hux made a disgusted sound. 'Well, since I am not driving 21 hours to visit a man who died of gangrene of the palm because he can't sit through a family dinner without maiming himself, I suggest you apologise to your mother and put some iodine on your fucking wound. I have an itinerary to go over with you. _After_ you've finished.'

'I hate you.' Ren's great body sunk sideways out of his computer chair. He stomped out of the room, mumbling about needing a towel and an aspirin and a better, less irritating boyfriend and leaving Hux to stare into the chaotic, depressive mess of Ren's bedroom instead of at chaotic, depressive Ren himself.

 

 

Because Hux was always online, often defended fascist government, and moderated a forum dedicated to arguing about the non-existence of ghosts and conspiracy theories, Ren had resigned himself to the fact that he was dating a clean-shaven, relatively fit neckbeard.

He was surprised to discover that the flesh and blood Brendol Hux Jr drove a Grand National GNX and wore Armani loafers.

Ren watched him march across the gravel in front of Taco Bell and into the restaurant, cross his arms, and swivel on his heels to face first the counter and then the booths like he was looking for someone who had badly wronged him, and who was about to be in a lot of trouble.

'Ren?' He said, when he spotted Ren wedged into a pink-and-blue booth like an overlarge raven stuffed into a too-small cage.

'Hey.' Ren shifted under his black sweatshirt.

Hux sat sternly, arms crossed. 'Have you ordered?' He asked.

'Not yet.' Ren shrugged. 'I heard a rumour the meat here is only 88% beef.'

'Hm. And what is the rest?'

'Maybe it's human.'

'Perfect. I could check another thing off my to-do list for today.'

Ren snickered. 'What grisly things have you already accomplished? Or should I not ask?'

'I've met you.' Hux's voice was almost soft, his eyes looking at Ren's clasped hands on the table between them. 'It's been slow, I admit.

 

Ren carried their order and his large Coke in one big hand, while Hux drank from a water bottle and held his other. They climbed the fence around an empty park, crossed the faded baseball diamond, and settled at the peak of a skateboard ramp.

'He's always with me.' Ren was saying, as Hux dabbed the tortillas with napkins.

'Mm.'

'If you don't want your guacamole I'll have it.'

Hux squeezed the greasy napkins and the take-out bag into a ball and tossed it off the ramp, out of sight. 'I do want it.'

Ren looked put upon.

'You should have bought yourself another one, Ren.' Hux told him.

'We could share that one.'

'That one is mine. You have sauce on your mouth.'

'You used up all the napkins.'

'You eat like a slob.'

Ren huffed. 'It's weird having you here.' He said. 'I usually come here alone.'

'You mean with your dead grandfather?'

'Yes.'

When the wind blew over the graffitied concrete and the burnt-looking black grass, there was barely a whisper. Before they'd sat on the ramp, the traffic had been loud. 'It's peaceful.' Hux said. He let Ren have the last bite of his tostada.

'I've always wanted to try talking to him.'

'Mm?'

'But a Ouija board needs two people at least.'

Hux closed his eyes, long-suffering. 'The Ideomotor Effect.' He said, knowing that Ren was watching him with big pupils and a pout. 'The influence of suggestion - '

'... or expectation on involuntary and unconscious motor behavior.' Ren drawled.

'Ah, so you do know it.'

'Obviously. It's your favourite.'

Hux opened his eyes. Ren was leaning over him, hands tucked away in his pockets, hood up, eyes smouldering. It struck Hux then, really completely hit him, that for the first time since they'd met (in a paranormal chat - Ren had been excitedly posting pictures of bones he'd found off a trail near his family's cabin while Hux told him he was an idiot who had found a dead deer, not a human femur), he could kiss him quiet.

 

'Ben?'

The noise in the kitchen stopped.

'Ben, what are you doing?'

'Nothing.'

Leia flicked the light on. Her son had his hand in one of the kitchen drawers. 'Why do you have your backpack on? Are you going out?'

'Yes.'

'Ben, it is nearly midnight.'

Ren's brow scrunched as he glared condescendingly back at her.

'Where are you going?' Leia demanded, when he skirted the dining room chairs and disappeared into the dark living room without answering her.

'Stop following me.' He snapped.

'Don't talk to me like that.'

'I will talk to you however I want, Mother.'

'Ben.' Leia turned on the light in the living room, too. 'I just want to know what you're doing.'

Ren spun around, fast and hulking and angry, always angry. 'You won't like it.' He snapped.

'Try me.'

'I am going to meet up with a man I met online.'

Leia's jaw relaxed. She looked more stunned than she had when Ren forced a fork through his own hand.

'He drove across the country to see me. Because we have been dating for over a year.' He turned back towards the door and took a long stride away from her.

'Why didn't you tell me?' Leia asked, hurrying after him, turning lights on, voice getting louder.

'We don't talk.' Ren spat. Leia saw that he was holding a barbeque lighter in one hand. He stopped at the end of the hallway to tuck it into a pocket of his backpack.

'Ben, I'm trying!' Leia shook her head. Her braids were tight around her skull. 'You choose to distance yourself, always up in your room, refusing to come out with the family. You've barely spent any time with your little cousin, and she's only here until August… _Ben,_ I have tried everything to be a good parent, to give you space, to wait for you to come to me, for you to get over this "goth" phase, but you have to help me out, here!'

Ren shrugged his backpack on and pulled his boots off the shoe rack.

'I have done _everything_ to be a better parent than your grandfather was. You think _we_ don't talk? Ben, you have _no idea_ \- '

Ren straightened. He was so tall, so much taller than Leia. She missed when she could pick him up under the armpits and hold him close to her. She hated being afraid of him.

'I wish he was my parent.'

'Well, Ben, he's not. Han and I are all you have.'

'You're wrong.' Ren said, his deep voice clear and sharp. He was like a blackhole in the doorway. 'Grandfather's always here with me. He cares about me.'

 

The forest floor - actively decomposing leaf skeletons and porous rotted dead plant matter, packed and salted by an evening rain, pungent - gave under Hux's boot like a nuclear implosion. In front of him, Ren swept vampirically between trunks and bushes. Every once in awhile he turned to check that Hux was following, and his face became a second moon, full and bright hanging in the black night, bobbing behind the long dark fingers of the trees.

Ren placed nine tall black candles in a circle around the Ouija board he pulled from his backpack, leaving room for himself and Hux to sit across from each other, like a couple having dinner. He sprinkled an herb mixture onto three white tea lights, which he tucked into a cluster at the corner of the board.

'You can make a Ouija board out of anything, as long as you have an alphabet and a planchette.' Ren told him, propping a chestnut triangle with a large hole at the centre on his knee.

'I was just thinking this seemed needlessly over dramatic.' Hux quipped.

They were in the woods behind the empty parking lot of an old car dealership on the outskirts of Ren's quiet neighbourhood. Hux suspected Ren came to the spot often, and that their séance was premeditated - like maybe Ren had only ever started dating him for this exact reason; he had no friends and his family hated him, but Ouija boards could not be used alone.

Ren was breathing deeply, lighting each candle. 'There are three vitally important rules.'

'Have fun and be yourself being the first two.'

'Be serious. Is the first one.'

'The Ideomotor Effect requires only one superstitious party. My role is the passive enabler, nothing more.'

'Fine. Get possessed. See if I care.'

Hux could feel Ren's anger and impatience like a physical weight on his tongue, like it was invading him and settling inside him, curling like a cat on his palate.

Ren lit an incense stick. 'Is there anyone here?' He asked, when Hux had placed his fingers on the planchette.

Hux had considered moving the thing himself, getting the board to instruct Ren to give him a blowjob or something, but he kept his arms relaxed as the planchette scraped across the board to YES.

'Ha!' Said Ren. His eyes were wild when he looked up at Hux. Ren's fervent excitement and the sandalwood smoke were heady. The night seemed to close in around them, hold a spotlight to them, but especially to Ren, who was a black candle himself, a red lipped and haunting beacon.

'Have you been.' Ren paused. 'Are you attached to me?'

Hux blinked. The reverent way Ren was speaking, his enraptured, religious expression, was setting him on edge. The flickering candles were a circle of fire closing them in and sucking at them. He was engulfed by the ridiculous conviction that the shadows were actually leaping at Ren, trying to grab at his cotton scarf. The air felt desirous.

YES said the board. Ren didn't look at Hux this time. Hux had become what he predicted he would - a means to an end, a passive enabler. A channel for Ren to play his deluded spiritual mind trick.

'For how long?' Ren asked.

7 said the board. Y-E-A-R-S-O-L-D.

'Since grandfather's death.'

Hux did not often repeat himself. He chose his words deliberately. He didn't like to speak emotionally. He could, however, not count on all his hands and toes the number of times he had insisted, sometimes loudly and forcefully, sometimes in tight paragraphs on the boards of the paranormal forums where he and Ren did a lot of their fighting, sometimes in hushed desperation, that Ren's late grandfather was not still with him, watching him, etcetera - not literally, at the _very least_.

The board said YES.

Ren looked overwhelmed with feeling. 'I knew it.' He breathed. The candles flickered and were suddenly snuffed, leaving Hux and Ren sitting in stagnant darkness.

Hux took his hands off the planchette to fumble for Ren's lighter. It wouldn't light.

'Don't do that.' Said Ren.

'I can't fucking see.'

Ren wrapped a hand around Hux's bicep and guided him through the branches back to the trail towards the parking lot.

'Do you not want your things?' Hux asked, when they broke the treeline.

Ren looked confused. 'What things?'

'Your stupid board.'

'I'm finished with it.'

'Isn't saying goodbye to the board one of your three vitally important rules, Ren?' Hux unlocked the passenger door of his glossy black car, lifting an inviting eyebrow at Ren, who was lurking just outside the circle of light from the streetlamp.

'Why would I want to say goodbye to my grandfather?'

 

 

Han licked his lips and shifted in the doorway. 'So.' He started, looking around Ren's attic room. 'You're still into this sort of stuff.'  He gestured vaguely at the dresser, where two half-melted black candles had dripped wax all over their vertebra holders and onto its wooden surface. Between them, a squirrel skull on a bed of pine gaped around a mouthful of quartz.

'Yes.'

Han sighed. 'Your mother used to like this stuff too, you know. Very New Age.'

Ren's lips twitched.

'I've been hearing some...  some stories, Ben.'

'So you are here to lecture me.'

'We're family, Ben. I'm here for you.'

Ren shook his head and turned back to his laptop screen. 'I have to go soon, so you might as well say what you want to say right now.'

'Where are you going?'

'None of your business.'

'Going to see your internet boyfriend?'

'Yes.'

'Why doesn't he come around the house?' Han suggested. 'I think your mother would feel much better if she could meet him.'

'I don't care. How she feels.' Ren growled. He stood from his chair and crossed the room to put his hoodie on.

'Ben, we miss you.'

'I'm right here.'

'Why don't you join your Uncle and I in Austin next month?'

'I do not want to see Luke.' Ren bit out.

'He's worried too, Ben. I know it's awkward, with him - smudging you, or whatever it is he does, with his sage, but he loves you. C'mon. He hasn't seen you in ages.'

'Fuck off.' Ren brushed past Han into the hall.

'Now don't you start with that language.

'Fuck. Off.'

Han growled and ducked in front of his son, blocking the hallway. Ben was taller than he was, broader, a dark presence that engulfed everything and everyone who entered his atmosphere, spitting them away like he had anti-gravity.

Ren pushed his father hard off the top step.

 

'I wish I'd been drunk last time.' Hux knelt to examine the vodka selection.

'You're not supposed to be intoxicated during a séance.'

'I was mildly tipsy.'

Ren crossed his arms and snorted. When he sunk down next to Hux, Hux noticed that he smelt woody and sweet. Like smoke.

'Do you like bourbon?' Hux asked, after picking out a forty.

'I don't care.'

Hux paid for a bottle of vodka, two of whiskey, and a Coke for Ren. It was overcast when they left the liquor store, and Ren kept his hood up over his wild hair. 'We should get a cart.' Ren suggested, as they passed the supermarket on the way to his empty skatepark.

'Whatever for, Ren?'

'So you won't have to carry all that.'

'You could carry it.'

'So neither of us will have to carry it. I need some pepper. From the store.'

Hux rolled his eyes while Ren snaked his way through parked cars to get a cart, into which he placed Hux's brown bags and the cloth bags he'd brought from home.

'Are you coming back to my hotel tonight?' Hux asked, after Ren had got his pepper and another bottle of Coke, feeling ridiculous pushing their stolen shopping cart across the grass to the park fence.

'Yes.' Ren plucked their bags out and dropped them with a clink and clatter on the other side of the chain-link before jumping over himself. 'I don't really want to go home.'

'Care to elaborate?'

'I pushed my dad down the stairs.'

'He's home from Mexico, then?'

'I think my mother called him about me.'

'That was strange of her. You're a model son.'

Ren looked oddly downcast. 'I don't think.' He said, like he was talking around a blockage in his throat. 'I don't. Have _intentions_.'

'Well, I do a lot less critical thinking when I'm with you.' Hux groused. 'You have bizarre hobbies, Ren.'

'You knew what you were getting into.'

They crossed the red gravel and the white first base plate and the yellowed grass and clambered up a small concrete bump at the centre of the skatepark. Hux looked out over the field at the bizarre decay into which they had placed themselves, like darts to a target. He was beginning to think of Ren as an epicentre. In the distance, green trees and yellow flowers. At his feet, cracks in the concrete blossoming with brittle weeds. There was a rotting stench emanating from somewhere in the bone-dry shrubs near the halfpipe.

Ren took a spraypaint can and drew a large circle, open on one side like a doorway and bisected by dark red paint that ran down the side of the platform they'd planted themselves on.

'Do your Skeptic's Society symbol, too, if you want.' Ren offered, shaking the can.

Hux had never tagged anything before. He uncapped one of his whiskey bottles and took a swig. 'I'm not an artist.' He told Ren.

Ren danced around the park like a ballerina possessed. He was very good at making circles, circles inside of circles, circles intersecting circles, and circles that bloomed into rectangles, triangles, and Latin.

'What sort of ritual is this?' Hux asked.

Ren rolled his shoulders, like the spray paint cans were heavy. 'The secret kind.' His voice was a rumble that poured over his teeth like a burst dam. 'You are lucky you have been permitted to observe.'

Hux flicked his eyebrows. The afternoon was getting colder. Ren was the only living thing in sight, the only thing making noise. The park smelt like flesh and sandalwood, like dead bird and heavy, burning sandalwood.

When Ren had finished, he looked exhausted. His face was slick. His long, full bodied hair had gone flat. His eyes were distant. He jumped when Hux broke his empty whiskey bottle against the quarterpipe - and Hux only did it because Ren wasn't answering when he called his name.

The park was coated in black and red paint, sprinkled lightly in broken glass.

 

When Rey pulled the Cheerio box out of the cupboard, a small black drawstring bag came down with it. She climbed off the counter and put the Cheerios on the stove.

There was a sound upstairs like a door banging, and then Ren was tearing down the stairs, hair wet from the shower. 'Don't touch that.' He said.

'I'm not touching it.' Rey put her hands on her hips. 'What is it?'

'It's mine.'

'I know that.'

Ren was creeping closer. His toes squeaked on the tile.

'You're scared I'm gonna open it.'

'No.'

Rey reached down, and Ren sprinted closer, crouched down so their eyes met while she held the tiny bag. 'There are bones in it.' She decided. 'I'm going to tell Aunt Leia.'

Ren's face looked like it was collapsing around his angry mouth and his flared nostrils. 'Don't fucking touch my things.' His voice dropped deeper, until it seemed to come from the depths of him, from dry lungs, from the inside of a vacuum, and when he spat _'don't get in my fucking way, you sneaky bitch'_ , he scratched at her hands until she dropped the little bag of bones into his waiting palm.

'You're a devil!' Rey screamed, chasing his retreating legs up the stairs, her face red and her hands cold where she'd held Ren's curse.

Her cousin slammed the attic door in her face.

 

'Therefore let there be made three Circles of the latitude of nine foot.' Ren's jaw clenched when Hux's iPad chimed. 'How do you turn off the fucking SimCity notifications?'

They were sitting back to back at the side of an old dirt road on a small wooden box Ren had bought from the farm supply. Feathers from the young black rooster inside blew lazily to rest on the rocks and in the potholes. 'You don't have to use _my_ iPad to access your edgy spellbook.' Hux said.

'I'd have a proper Grimoire printed on human skin and written using your blood as the ink, if I had my way.'

'What was the notification for? It may be important.'

Ren leant sharply back, pushing Hux's upper body forward, and they scuffled a moment, until Hux wasn't sure if Ren was trying to push him off the rooster crate, use him as a headrest, or irritate him so much he snapped and murdered him; assisted suicide. 'If you don't stop making a nuisance of yourself I will take my iPad and my car and drive back to my nice apartment in the rooster-and Ren-free city, where I will ban you from every forum I am able and never speak to you again.' Hux puffed, driving his elbow into Ren's side and making him stumble sideways and catch himself by sliding his boot through the gravel.

Ren seeped in his silent anger for a moment.

'I still don't understand why you need a demon-summoning to talk to your grandfather.' Hux asked, propping his ankle on his knee and looking up at the blue morning sky.

'Because he's dead.'

Hux sighed. 'This is nonsense.'

'Would you make yourself useful and let there be made three Circles of the latitude of nine foot?' Ren snapped. 'It's nine o'clock.'

When the initial circles were drawn and measured, fitting neatly into the crossroads, Hux dragged the rooster into the Eastbound road and hoped to Hell no one drove up. He was certain that Ren would let there be made three Circles of the latitude of nine foot at 9am every morning until he could finish his ritual, and Hux couldn't say for certain he wouldn't help. He was sickly proud of how geometrically perfect he had let the Circles be made to be.

'North be Omega.' Ren said aloud, sketching an O on the road. 'South be Alpha. Sanctus. Immortalitas.' He was using a long stick to create lines, like a city planner making streets. 'Netos. Yayn. Neron.' His voice became a hazy chant, deep and faraway. When he stepped over the lines of the pentacles ('Netos. Yayn. Neron.'), his footfalls were thunderous and his silhouette against the blank blue sky and yellow Earth was otherworldly. He was unnatural.

It was obvious to Hux that Ren had never tried to hold a rooster before, because when he reached into the cage, his hands were nervous. He grabbed it around the middle like he was trying to carry a fat, squalling cat.

'Flip it over, for fucks sake, Ren.' Hux instructed. 'Grab its legs.'

Ren held the rooster away from himself, wincing when it beat its wings at his face. He shot Hux a nasty glower.

'Now you can baby it.' Hux was saying, 'Keep ahold of it and sort of...' He mimed cradling a child, complete with aborted rocking motions.

'I'm not going to fucking soothe it.'

'Suit yourself.'

Ren returned to the centre-most circle, which was now a twisting and complicated design in the middle of the crossroads, and pulled a small, oval mirror from the pouch of his sweatshirt. 'Sassor. O vos omnes. Look upon your own face.' He dropped the mirror at his feet. The rooster was still flapping when Ren retrieved his switchblade from the back pocket of his jeans and clicked it open.

'Sanctus!' Ren cried, stabbing at the rooster, 'Immortalitas!' Blood sprayed on his face, dribbled on the road, blotted on his sweatshirt. The rooster shrieked as Ren doused himself in it, like a man trying to drown himself, crying, 'Sanctus, Immortalitas, Netos, Yayn, Neron, Batin, Amakar, Grimakon, Grammaton, Grammaton, _Grammaton_!' Ren's lips were glossy, his eyes darker than marbles. He held the black and red rooster by the legs like Hux had told him he should, refusing to soothe it, they were twins in the empty road; when Ren finally dropped the dead bird, the feathers stuck to his arm and when he tried to wipe the slick gore and the feathers on the front of his pants, they stuck there instead.

'Perhaps your grandfather was busy today.' Hux remarked, in the silence following Ren's cock massacre. 'Which is too bad, really, since you won't let me meet the rest of your family.'

 

Leia leant over the kitchen island when she heard the door snap open. Rey was dipping the crusts of a grilled cheese in ketchup. She glared at Ren with red smears around her angry mouth.

'Aren't you spending the day with your...' Leia trailed off as her son stalked past the bar stools and stopped to stand behind one of Leia's kitchen chairs. His hands hung at his sides. He was crusted in blood.

'Ben.' Han said, from the couch in the family room.

'I am not Ben.'

Han crossed the room to lean in the doorway to the dining room. Leia was giving him pointed looks from over Rey's head.

'What did you do?' Leia asked, when Han didn't.

'Your son is dead.'

Leia made a disgusted sound. 'Ben, get your ass upstairs and take a shower.'

'What do you mean, son?' Han asked, his words tripping over hers. They looked annoyed at each other for a moment before Han continued. 'Is there something you want to tell us?'

Ren's bloody head turned very slowly to look at his father. _'I am fucking your orphan son from the inside.'_

 

Hux thought he recognised Ren's house by the heavy black curtains on the attic window, and was convinced he had the right place by the odd gloom that had swallowed the house like impossible cloud coverage. It was just like Ren to cloak his family home in a depressing weather anomaly, the dramatic asshole.

He parked on the curb.

'You're looking for Ben!'

Hux halted on the pavement. 'I am.' A little girl in a white t-shirt was riding her bike up the road towards him.

'I'm Rey.' She said, stopping just in time at the bumper of Hux's car and swinging off her bike. 'Ben's grounded. There's a demon possessing him.'

'That must be why he never called.'

'He's not allowed computers or phones or internet boyfriends.' Rey confirmed. 'Here.'

Rey pushed a black lump at Hux's chest.

'It's obsidian.' She explained. 'You have to keep it.'

Hux looked up at Ren's curtain, at the greyscale cast of the Organa residence, and back at Rey, who was watching him fiercely. 'I don't believe this.' He muttered. 'I don't believe in the occult.'

Rey glowered at him. 'My cousin isn't just evil. He attracts spirits, too.' She said. 'That makes it worse.'

Hux startled when the front door of the house squeaked open. Rey's intense gaze pulled him in much the same way Ren's did. They had the same eyes.

'Rey, who is this?' The terse looking woman who had emerged from the house asked.

'You must be Ren's mother.' Hux slipped the obsidian into the pocket of his overcoat. 'My name is Brendol Hux, the Second.'

Leia looked confused for a moment, before sighing. 'You're the boyfriend.'

'Yes.'

'Well, come in, since you're here -'

'No!' Rey shouted, stepping in front of Hux. 'He can't go inside!'

'Rey.'

'That's alright, Ms Organa.' Hux took a step backwards towards his car. 'Rey told me you aren't allowing Ren to have visitors.'

'You're _my_ visitor.' Leia looked tired. She was dressed formally, as though for a meeting, but she was wearing worn pink slippers and her updo was sagging.

'Then he has to stay in the kitchen.' Rey conceded.

Hux agreed and followed Rey into the house.

'Ben put hexes everywhere.' Rey told him, kicking off her shoes. 'But I took them all out of the cupboards. I made chamomile tea.'

'Chamomile is fine.' Hux said.

'You have to drink it.'

'I will.'

Leia indicated that he should take a seat across from her in the dining room. Rey brought them all a cup of tea and sat to his left with her elbows on the table.

'I think it's best to get right to the point.' Leia said. 'Ben is deeply troubled.'

'I agree completely.' Hux said. The tea made him feel lighter than he'd felt in days. He hadn't realised how high-strung he'd been since arriving in Ren's hometown.

'I know he struggles, but he refuses to communicate, so I haven't the slightest idea what he struggles _with._ I had no idea he was even _gay_ , and then I find out he's in a longterm relationship with a strange man he found on the Internet. It's just made me realise how effectively he hides from me. And from his father. We both want to be in his life, but he makes it so difficult for us. I was honestly starting to think he was in some sort of cult.'

Hux thought Leia's fears were perfectly reasonable.. He himself had often wondered if Ren would end up on a private farm in the Midwest wearing nothing but tinfoil someday.

'I just don't know what to do.' Leia said, leaning over the table, tea hidden in her white knuckled hands. 'To get my son back.'

Rey crossed her arms. 'We have to exorcise him.' She announced.

Hux had never cared to keep other people's secrets, and said 'Ren claims his grandfather has been with him since the funeral.'

'He used to set him a place at the table when he was younger.' Leia told him, looking lost. 'Our family has a history.'

Hux nodded his understanding. 'My stepmother takes antipsychotics. I have long thought Ren would benefit from psychiatric intervention.'

'A _paranormal_ history, Mr. Hux.'

The stairs creaked.

'Talking about me?' Ren's voice came from somewhere underground, abrasive; like a saw was grinding his tongue. He was standing on the landing, framed by the grey window, still wearing his black hoodie and his heavy boots. His face looked slightly damp. The smell of wood-fire and perfume wafted off him like fog off water. His stained hands held a bowl full of ashes.

'You weren't answering your phone.' Hux said, standing and brushing off his coat. 'Thank you for tea, Ms. Organa. Rey.'

Ren's breathing was like a pulse filling the entire house. 'I told you. I don't want you to meet them!' Ren lunged down the last couple steps and banged his fist into the wall, pulled it out of the crumpled plaster streaked and scraped.

'Maybe you'll remember how little I care about your familial hangups and eccentricities next time you don't feel like answering my calls. I'm only here a week and a half.'

Leia was looking at him with astonishment and something else Hux didn't understand - it was either hope or hatred.

Rey bent over her tea when Ren pushed past her chair to stand in front of Hux, so Hux could smell the horrible reek of him, look directly into his shiny black eyes, and feel his ancient breath when he spat _'I will rip your tongue right out of your pretty mouth_.'

Hux sneered. 'Save the dirty talk for the hotel.'

 

Ren had cremated the rooster. That's what was in the bowl. Hux warned him against getting the ashes on his leather seats, and Ren rolled his eyes. The porcelain had scorch marks around the outside.

'Did you do that in your bedroom?' Hux asked, flinging his coat into the backseat before pulling his car into the street.

Ren wet his lips. 'Yes.'

'I'm shocked you didn't burn the house down.'

'What did my family tell you?' Ren growled.

'That they failed to teach you the difference between reality and fairytale.' Hux turned onto the highway, pushing Ren out of his way with his arm. 'I can't see when you're slouching.'

‘Why did they let me _leave_?’

‘Self preservation, I imagine. Do you really think your mother is physically capable of stopping you from doing anything you want? You honestly never considered betraying the terms of your grounding and walking out the front door?’ Hux snickered. ‘Ren, your mother is right - you need serious help.’

Ren had his fingers in the bowl of ashes. _'If you get in my way, I will strangle you until your face is as red as the hair on your cock._ '

Hux snorted. 'It might be about time we got a safeword.'

There was a parkade across the street from the Hotel, down a ramp into the underbelly of a tall glass office building downtown. Hux chose to pay for parking there rather than parking in the lot in the front. It had a security guard after 11pm.

Ren sifted through his rooster ashes while Hux turned the engine off. Ren's spidery fingers pushed deep and scratched back out again, clasped around something round, like a child playing with a shell in the sand. Hux angled himself so he could see what Ren was using to scoop the ashes: a small oval mirror.

Hux clenched his teeth as Ren lifted the mirror out of the bowl, transfixed like he always was when he played with his occult toys, and looked at himself.

'Ren.' Hux snapped.

 _'I am not Ren._ ' Said Ren's bitten lips.

'It's no wonder your family _fucking hates you_.'

Ren cradled his mirror in his palms. 'You are dating me. By choice.'

When Hux reached into Ren's lap and took the mirror, Ren roared. Hux smashed it on his stick shift, and then smashed it again when it didn't break, while Ren's face twisted with rage and his shouting filled the small car with panic.

' _Do not interfere_!' Ren shrieked, grabbing at Hux's hands as he bashed the mirrorface on the hand brake, on the cigarette lighter, on Ren's fingernails, until it split diagonally and the glass popped out of its gold and green frame.

Ren cried impossibly louder, deafening. He was bleeding on Hux's leather seats. Split diagonally. Splintered collarbone exposed, a gash down his cheek over one of his expressive eyes. His hands fell to his sides, twitching, as he stared pleadingly, pained, at Hux.

'Ren.' Hux dropped the mirror. 'Fucking Hell, Ren!'

Something whitish widened the wound on Ren's side and crawled out. Long fingers pulled tiny shoulders and an emaciated ribcage out of Ren's chest, and blood rushed out after it. When its undeveloped hind end flopped free of Ren, it turned to look at Hux. ' _I warned you._ ' It ground out of it's wide, toothy mouth.

Hux fumbled the lock on the car door with tense, uncooperative hands. His fingers felt stiff and curled like dying leaves. The demon that had been in Ren took hold of his seatbelt. It glinted red and black with viscera. Hux couldn't make himself try to touch it, to pull its hands away so he could undo the restraints. He wiggled fervently upwards until he was free, fell on his hip on the pavement. The demon crawled to the driver's side. Ren's torn face had smeared blood on the window behind it.

Hux scrambled to his feet and ran. The carpark had two elevator exits. He turned past a concrete pillar and spotted a flickering neon exit sign, scuffed his shoes running and had to push himself upright, carpet-burning his palm. He could hear something dragging its body behind him, the gravel growl of the demon that he recognised as the bass behind Ren's anger, telling him _I can't be stopped so easily_ , and the whole parking lot smelt like sandalwood, like fresh meat and sandalwood.

He pounded the elevator’s up button. Behind him, the demon had stopped. It sat with its head tilted like an expectant dog under one of the burnt-out industrial lights, staring at him through the small glass elevator room.

The elevator moved slowly. The lift shook when it reached the Main floor. Hux shifted nervously. He mashed the "open door" button. The elevator hummed, and started to descend.

'No.' Hux breathed against the slit in the metal doors. 'No! No, fuck no! No!' He hammered his thumb into the numbers for the upper floors. The buttons didn't even illuminate. When the lift jolted to a stop in the basement carpark, the emergency lights were on and the main electricity was not. Hux hadn't cried in years, but he was crying now.

The doors opened. Waiting with its mangled legs draped behind it like white intestines was Ren's demon.

 

 

Rey's alyssum bouquets framed the window like purple sentinels. The carnations from Leia bobbed in the air from the air conditioner on the bedside table.

Rey had burst into the room first and jumped onto Ben's bed, told him she'd decided to like him slightly better now the he couldn't scream at her, and then jumped back up again to place the flowers. She did all this with a steely look, daring Ben to protest as she lay arbutus twigs on the windowsill.

Ben's damaged vocal cords allowed only whispers. He had lost an eye. His jaw and ribs were snapped and shattered like broken glass. One of his arms wouldn't move properly, so a nurse helped him eat

Leia sat next to him and took his hand. 'I love you.' She said.

Ben took a shaky breath.

It was then Hux had walked in, wearing a long black coat and holding an umbrella. 'I hope I'm not interrupting.' He said to Leia.

'Not at all.'

Han eyed Hux as he scraped a chair to Ben's other side and took his hand, too.

They got along, Hux and his family. Even Han's rapid-fire questions about the military University where Hux studied were well-intentioned. Ben had never, in his memory, been in a room full of people who all got along.

When visiting hours ended and his family stood to leave, Ben felt that he would miss them. Leia kissed his brow. Rey barely touched him when she hugged him, but she waved at him when she disappeared through the door.

And then he was alone with Hux. 'Some first meeting.' Ben murmured. His words slid against each other like slugs in a stream. 'Your Skeptics Society won't be happy to hear about your resignation.'

Hux leant closer, so his lips brushed soft and dry on Ben's ear. He smelt like sandalwood, like he'd put cologne on just to visit Ben, and Ben found himself smiling crookedly with his broken mouth.

' _I am fucking your non-believer boyfriend from the inside_.'


End file.
